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Popular Ratification Draft Online
Mar. 18th, 2024 03:12 pmI have drawn up a draft of the Popular Ratification proposal that I discussed in an entry from a couple of days ago. It replaces existing WSFS Constitution Section 6.6 and 6.7 with an admittedly more complicated and longer wording, but that's because it is trying to cover a lot of the things that I'm pretty sure people will ask.
This is in a Google Document, but the link below is supposed to allow anyone to view and comment on the proposal, even without a Google account:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18S065_QfqSKnZW4TstXFh47ntSto0hjwYV652ezUK6U/edit?usp=sharing
As I was drawing it up, I decided that I did need to make things start sooner and the voting period last longer, because it needs to be accessible to people who don't have computers and internet connections. I know it is a horrifying thought, but not ever Worldcon member has a computer and an internet connection. Worldcons need to provide for contacting their members who don't have email addresses.
The deadlines in this proposal are working backwards from 30 days before the first Business Meeting (BM) of the Worldcon, because that is the deadline for submitting new business. If we're going to have a ratification process that allows members of the Worldcon in the ratifying year to propose new things based on the ratification vote, I think we have to give people at least 30 days to do so. Thus we get the following:
BM-120 Days: Ratification voting opens. (The Administering Worldcon can open ratification voting sooner if they want to do so.)
BM-90 Days: Ratification voting closes.
BM-60 Days: Administering Worldcon must announce results of ratification voting by this date. They can announce results sooner if they want to do so.
BM-30 Days: Deadline for submitting new proposals to the Business Meeting. This is existing WSFS Constitution Section 5.1.6 and is not part of the Popular Ratification proposal.
(Incidentally, when I first started attending Worldcon in 1984, the deadline for submitting business was 18 hours before the Business Meeting, not 30 days. The way you found out what had been submitted for consideration by the BM was to show up at the Preliminary Business Meeting.)
This proposal is not perfect. There are no perfect proposals. If we try to make things perfect, we will get nothing at all. So we need to think of things that will work and that might conceivably get two consecutive WSFS Business Meetings to vote to approve them. It's going to be a difficult sell no matter what, because we're asking the Business Meeting to give up some of its authority in exchange for improving the legitimacy of our governance process by letting the rest of the members have a voice in the process.
Addressing the people who have said it's bad to allow the members of the Worldcon where proposals get first passage, I have two things:
1. Only a few hundred people at most attend the Business Meeting. There are literally thousands of members of WSFS who aren't at the meeting, so what's wrong with allowing them to vote?
2. While it might be "tidier" to limit ratification voting to only members of the following Worldcon, for the reasons I explained above about the timing of proposals for the Business Meeting, we have to cut off voting far enough in advance to give members a reasonable chance to submit new proposals at the second year's meeting. If we postpone the end of ratification voting to 30 days out or even through the end of Site Selection voting, it will not be possible to react to the results until the third year. That proved to be a killer for the last version of Popular Ratification, considering that we do appear to have a significant number of people who think that the current system takes too long as it is. That last group wants changes to be made immediately, and to be retroactive years into the past, so telling them to make the time even longer it's going to wash.
I've posted this as a Google Doc because it should be relatively easy to change if we identify things that need revising.
This is in a Google Document, but the link below is supposed to allow anyone to view and comment on the proposal, even without a Google account:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18S065_QfqSKnZW4TstXFh47ntSto0hjwYV652ezUK6U/edit?usp=sharing
As I was drawing it up, I decided that I did need to make things start sooner and the voting period last longer, because it needs to be accessible to people who don't have computers and internet connections. I know it is a horrifying thought, but not ever Worldcon member has a computer and an internet connection. Worldcons need to provide for contacting their members who don't have email addresses.
The deadlines in this proposal are working backwards from 30 days before the first Business Meeting (BM) of the Worldcon, because that is the deadline for submitting new business. If we're going to have a ratification process that allows members of the Worldcon in the ratifying year to propose new things based on the ratification vote, I think we have to give people at least 30 days to do so. Thus we get the following:
BM-120 Days: Ratification voting opens. (The Administering Worldcon can open ratification voting sooner if they want to do so.)
BM-90 Days: Ratification voting closes.
BM-60 Days: Administering Worldcon must announce results of ratification voting by this date. They can announce results sooner if they want to do so.
BM-30 Days: Deadline for submitting new proposals to the Business Meeting. This is existing WSFS Constitution Section 5.1.6 and is not part of the Popular Ratification proposal.
(Incidentally, when I first started attending Worldcon in 1984, the deadline for submitting business was 18 hours before the Business Meeting, not 30 days. The way you found out what had been submitted for consideration by the BM was to show up at the Preliminary Business Meeting.)
This proposal is not perfect. There are no perfect proposals. If we try to make things perfect, we will get nothing at all. So we need to think of things that will work and that might conceivably get two consecutive WSFS Business Meetings to vote to approve them. It's going to be a difficult sell no matter what, because we're asking the Business Meeting to give up some of its authority in exchange for improving the legitimacy of our governance process by letting the rest of the members have a voice in the process.
Addressing the people who have said it's bad to allow the members of the Worldcon where proposals get first passage, I have two things:
1. Only a few hundred people at most attend the Business Meeting. There are literally thousands of members of WSFS who aren't at the meeting, so what's wrong with allowing them to vote?
2. While it might be "tidier" to limit ratification voting to only members of the following Worldcon, for the reasons I explained above about the timing of proposals for the Business Meeting, we have to cut off voting far enough in advance to give members a reasonable chance to submit new proposals at the second year's meeting. If we postpone the end of ratification voting to 30 days out or even through the end of Site Selection voting, it will not be possible to react to the results until the third year. That proved to be a killer for the last version of Popular Ratification, considering that we do appear to have a significant number of people who think that the current system takes too long as it is. That last group wants changes to be made immediately, and to be retroactive years into the past, so telling them to make the time even longer it's going to wash.
I've posted this as a Google Doc because it should be relatively easy to change if we identify things that need revising.
